Sanders, Zuckerberg and Oprah: the Democratic race to topple Trump in 2020

Have you heard of John Delaney? No? Well, he’s running for president of the United States. The multimillionaire Maryland congressman became the first Democrat to formally enter the 2020 presidential campaign in late July and now holds the record for the earliest candidacy declaration in US political history.

Delaney won’t be the Democratic nominee, of course. But in an era in which a property-developer-turned-reality-TV-star is sitting in the Oval Office, how do you tell any candidate they’re not good enough to run? Or that they can’t win?

This is the big political headache for Democratic strategists. The sooner the party can unite behind a viable candidate to beat Donald Trump, goes their argument, the better. But that just isn’t going to happen.

The problem for the Democrats is that there are too many candidates who want to take on Trump – the Hill newspaper listed 43 possible names in May – and too few with the profile and vision required to defeat him. It won’t be easy. Ask Hillary Clinton. She didn’t think Trump could beat her – but he did (in the electoral college, at least). The former Secretary of State, with her history of scandals at home and support for wars abroad, was the wrong candidate for the wrong election. The front of her book about the 2016 campaign juxtaposes the title, What Happened, with the byline, “Hillary Clinton”, prompting several wags on Twitter to point out that it is the first book to contain both the question and the answer on the cover.

Former vice-president Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who ran a remarkable insurgent campaign against Clinton in last year’s primaries, have said they believe they could have defeated Trump. The two men are now the frontrunners in the Democratic race for 2020, with their respective supporters stressing their appeal to the “blue collar” Americans who voted for Trump in droves. But are they too old to be president? Come November 2020, socialist Sanders will be 79 and gaffe-prone Biden 77. Elizabeth Warren, the banker-bashing senator from Massachusetts, who is perhaps the only other Democrat with national name recognition, will be 71.

Age, of course, shouldn’t be a barrier to success. And remember: Trump himself will be 74 come 2020 while Ronald Reagan left office a few weeks shy of his 78th birthday. Nevertheless, it is difficult to disagree with Politico’s verdict on the dilemma facing the Democrats: “Old but well-known vs fresh but anonymous.”

The “fresh but anonymous” brigade includes centrist senators Kamala Harris of California (who will be 56 in 2020) and Cory Booker of New Jersey (who will be 51). Both have signed on to Sanders’ ambitious Medicare-for-all universal healthcare bill in an attempt to win brownie points with an increasingly progressive Democratic base. Yet both have records that bother the left: as California’s attorney general, Harris refused to prosecute Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank over foreclosure violations, while the Wall Street-aligned Booker attacked Obama in 2012 for daring to impugn the good name of… Bain Capital.

Then there are the outsiders who might run – tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, and celebrity billionaires and millionaires such as Oprah Winfrey and, I kid you not, WWE-wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Zuckerberg is definitely considering a presidential bid. But Facebook is currently embroiled in the massive political controversy over whether or not Russia influenced the result of the 2016 election. And also: The Zuck has all the charisma of a potted plant.

Oprah oozes charisma. But she wouldn’t be crazy enough to run for president, would she? Don’t be so sure. “If you need to set a thief to catch a thief, you need a star – a grand, outsized, fearless star whom Trump can neither intimidate nor outshine – to catch a star,” wrote conservative columnist John Podhoretz in the New York Post in September, describing Winfrey as the Democrats’ “best hope”. And Oprah’s response? “Thanks for your vote of confidence!” she tweeted to Podhoretz.

If the Democratic primaries were held tomorrow, it is Sanders who would win by a country mile. As I have noted on these pages before, the Vermont senator – who, as an independent, isn’t even a member of the Democratic Party! – is the most popular politician in the United States right now. But the primary campaign won’t begin in earnest for at least another 70 or 80 weeks. In Trump’s chaotic America, a week isn’t a long time in politics – an hour is. Things could change fast on the Democratic side.

Finally, there is the political elephant in the room. It just might not matter whom the Democratic candidate is because sitting US presidents tend to be re-elected. Twenty presidents have stood for re-election since 1900: 15 of them were returned to office and only five were defeated. The past three presidents – Clinton, Bush, Obama – have all been two-term presidents.

As Hunter S Thompson observed in his classic book, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, “Any incumbent President is unbeatable, except in a time of mushrooming national crisis or a scandal so heinous – and with such obvious roots in the White House – as to pose a clear and present danger to the financial security and/or physical safety of millions of voters in every corner of the country.”

The Democrats must be hoping that Trump, as president, continues to personify national crisis and scandal and danger. It might be their only chance of winning back the White House in 2020.

“I want the state to think like an anarchist”: Dutch historian Rutger Bregman on why the left must reclaim utopianism

History consists of the impossible becoming the inevitable. Universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery and the welfare state were all once dismissed as fantastical dreams. But in the Western world, politics today often feels devoid of the idealism and ambition of previous generations. As the mainstream left has struggled to define its purpose, the right has offered superficially seductive solutions (from Brexit to border walls).

One of those seeking to resolve what he calls a “crisis of imagination” is the Dutch historian and journalist Rutger Bregman. His book Utopia for Realists advocates policies including a universal basic income (a guaranteed minimum salary for all citizens), a 15-hour working week and global open borders. Since its publication last year, Bregman’s manifesto has been translated into more than 20 languages, establishing him as one of Europe’s pre-eminent young thinkers.

“I was born in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and people of my generation were taught that utopian dreams are dangerous,” Bregman recalled when we met for coffee at the London office of his publisher Bloomsbury. A softly-spoken but forceful character, dressed casually in a light blue jacket, jeans and Nike Air trainers, Bregman continued: “It seemed that the age of big ideas was over. Politics had just become technocracy and politicians just managers.”

Bregman’s imagination was fired by anarchist thinkers such as the Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin. He identifies with the left libertarian tradition, which emphasises individual freedom from both market and state domination. Another formative influence was Russell Jacoby, Bregman’s history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose book The Last Intellectuals (2000) lamented the decline of the polymath in an era of academic specialisation. Utopia for Realists, a rigorously argued and lucidly written work, fuses insights from history, politics, philosophy and economics. Bregman echoes Oscar Wilde’s sentiment: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.”

Such romanticism partly filled the void left by Bregman’s loss of religious faith at the age of 18 (his father was a Protestant minister in the church opposite the family home in Zoetermeer, western Netherlands). “Maybe utopianism is my form of religion in a world without God,” Bregman mused.

For him, utopia is not a dogma to be ruthlessly imposed but a liberating and inclusive vision. It would be “completely ludicrous”, Bregman remarked, for a Western politician to suddenly propose global open borders. Rather, such ideals should animate progressive reforms: one could call it incremental utopianism.

“History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century,” Bregman observed. “And the data is behind me.” Economists liken the present system to leaving “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” and estimate that allowing migrants to move to any country they choose would increase global GDP by between 67 and 147 per cent.

The thoughtful Conservative MP Nick Boles recently objected to a universal basic income on the grounds that “mankind is hard-wired to work. We gain satisfaction from it. It gives us a sense of identity, purpose and belonging”.

Bregman did not dispute this but argued for a radical redefinition of work. “A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 37 per cent of British workers think their own job is absolutely meaningless,” he noted. Rather than such “bullshit jobs” (to use the anthropologist David Graeber’s phrase), work should be defined as “doing something of value, making this world a little more interesting, richer, beautiful – whether that’s paid or unpaid doesn’t really matter.”

In Utopia for Realists, Bregman decries “underdog socialism”: a left that is defined by what it is against (austerity, privatisation, racism), rather than what it is for. How does he view the ascent of Jeremy Corbyn? “Most of the ideas are sensible but they’re a bit old-fashioned, it felt like stepping into a time machine,” Bregman said of the 2017 Labour manifesto (which majored on renationalisation). Yet he recognised that Corbyn had expanded the limits of the possible. “All this time, people were saying that Labour shouldn’t become too radical or it will lose votes. The election showed that, in fact, Labour wasn’t radical enough.”

“We need a completely different kind of democracy, a society where you don’t think purely in terms of representation,” Bregman explained, citing the Brazilian city Porto Alegre’s pioneering experiments in participatory democracy (citizens’ assemblies, for instance, determine public spending priorities). “I call it the anarchist state. The anarchists want to abolish the state; what I want to do is to make the state think like an anarchist.”

Rutger Bregman has a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature: “People are pretty nice” (his next book will challenge “the long intellectual history in the West that says, deep down, we’re all animals, we’re all beasts”).

He dismissed those who cite the 20th century – the age of Stalinism and fascism – as proof of the ruinous consequences of utopian thought. “People are always yearning for a bigger story to be part of, it’s not enough to live our own private lives. If you don’t give them [people] hope, they’ll go for something else.”